Creating Custom Assessments

Custom assessments can be built by teachers who can then share the assessments with other users in their districts. Custom assessments can also be built by district leaders and other assessment designers who can distribute those assessments to all teachers via the Catalog.

Custom assessments are built in the Library. Navigate to the Library at the top right-hand corner of your screen.

STEP 1: CREATE TASKS

In the Library, select the "Create" button in the left side navigation bar.

Follow the below steps to create an assessment:

1. Name your assessment. Select "Untitled Assessment" and name your assessment.
2. Assign a grade level or grade levels to the assessment.
3. Start building your assessment. Select "Create Question" to create your first question. Clicking the Create Question button will open the below window. There are 5 steps in this window that are detailed below:
   1. Question Name
   2. Min and Max Scores
   3. Question Text
   4. Answers
   5. Link to Standards

Question Name: Name the question. Keep your names short with no more than 18 characters. What you put here will show up in a couple of places for your users:

• At the top of the spreadsheet in the “Grade Book” where the results of the assessment will be entered.  
• At the bottom of the item analysis report.  

Min and Max Scores: Set the minimum and maximum score values for the task. Scores for all assessments must be integers, not fractions or decimal values.

Question Text: The question text is the question task.

• If the task is being administered on paper, this might be exactly what the students see on the paper. For example: 2 + 3  
• If this is an interview task, enter the text that you want the teachers to read. For example: Start counting from 29 and I will tell you when to stop.
• If this is an observation, put a general description of what you are looking for. For example: Student discourse patterns.

Answers: Entering answers is optional for certain assessments but necessary for an interview or observational task. Click on “Add an answer” to add an answer.

In an interview assessment, the "Answer" field will be the rubric description. For example: The student counts fluently and accurately.  In the smaller text field to the right, enter the score value which is associated with that description. This will be a whole number and should align with the min and max values that you established earlier.  

If the assessment is an observational description this will be the place to enter this. For example: All students are engaged in discussing mathematics with other students.

Note that these descriptions will be visible in the interview tool later.

Link to Standards:  Each question can be linked to one or more standards.  This is how we create the progress toward proficiency calculations, so this is important.

1. When you click to attach a standard, it will open a new window to search in.
2. Start typing the code for the standard. Once you see the standard you are looking for in the list below, click on that standard, then hit the OK button. You will see the standard appear in the list at the bottom of the task. Click to enter another standard.
3. Continue until all of your tasks are set up.

STEP 2: SET PERFORMANCE LEVELS

Once you have created all of the tasks, you will need to set the performance levels. Select the Performance tab (see image below).

Please note that performance levels will need to be set for the overall assessment and for each individual task. To set the performance levels, click on the pencil icon.

Pencil icon: 

Performance levels are discrete in Forefront and can be designed for each task. If the task is designed to only assess toward proficiency, you do not need to include advanced proficiency, nor do you need to assign the lowest performance levels. Consider what is appropriate for the task and for the overall assessment.

ADDITIONAL STEPS (OPTIONAL)

Attach Files: To distribute a paper assessment, documentation, anchor papers or student work samples, upload files in the Files tab.

Details: This tab allows you to add any notes or other information that you might want to keep track of. For example: when was this assessment written and by whom?

Share Assessments: If you want to share the assessment with specific people, click on the three dots and use the share icon there.  

Publish: District leaders can publish assessments for their whole district to use. Click where it says, “Not Published” to publish to your “District Assessments” collection.